RESEARCH ON WHETHER POWER CORRUPTS. I posted here on Lord Acton’s observation that: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men….” Jonah Lehrer had an article in the Wall Street Journal (August 14-15) and here at his blog, The Frontal Cortex, on psychological research which seems to support Lord Acton. He cites studies which show that entering college freshmen with the highest scores on agreeableness and extroversion wind up at the top of their social hierarchy and says that studies of the military, corporations and politics give similar results. Then Lehrer cites Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at Berkeley on what happens after power has been achieved: “Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that’s crucial for empathy and decision-making.” It may be that one reason for the lack of empathy may be what is shown by Chekhov: servants are not seen. Lehrer says that people in positions of authority “spend much less time making eye contact, at least when a person without power is talking.”
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
RESEARCH ON WHETHER POWER CORRUPTS.
Saturday, August 28th, 2010COLLECTING MORE MEDICAL DATA.
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010COLLECTING MORE MEDICAL DATA. This article by Gina Kolata describes the success of a large-scale long-term study of Alzeimer’s patients. The study involved the sharing of a massive data set developed over several years about some 800 patients. What is remarkable evidently is that scientists and companies gave up ownership rights in the data. The data is leading to a “wealth of recent scientific papers on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s” and over 100 studies of drugs relating to the disease. I am surprised that this kind of sharing is “rare.” I am also surprised that this kind of collection of data is unusual. I argued here that there are enormous amounts of data dealing with breast cancer in tumor registries that does not seem to be analyzed and should be analyzed. So I am pleased to see that this project is considered a success and that a similar project will be conducted for Parkinson’s.
CROWDSOURCING.
Thursday, August 12th, 2010CROWDSOURCING. The wikipedia article on Foldit says that it is a variant of “Crowdsourcing”, which is discussed in this wikipedia article. I posted here about James Suroweicki’s book THE WISDOM OF CROWDS, which is about another form of throwing a problem out to a large group of people. Surowiecki discusses how groups can under certain circumstances make better decisions than could any individual expert. Foldit is a little different because it seeks to collects ideas of individuals no matter what their backgrounds. What they have in common is the desire to obtain the benefits of the thinking of more people.
NONSCIENTISTS DOING BIOCHEMISTRY—THE VIDEO GAME.
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010NONSCIENTISTS DOING BIOCHEMISTRY—THE VIDEO GAME. This Economist article describes a videogame, with 57,000 registered users, in which players score points by finding chemically stable configurations for chains of protein molecules. The game is called “Foldit.” The science behind the game is described here. Some excerpts: “Every protein consists of a long chain of joined-together amino acids….. Every kind of protein folds up into a very specific shape….[The shape] specifies the function of the protein.” The game was designed by scientists to further research into proteins, and it has done so. People can do in some respects as well as the best best current algorithm. They are especially good at what the Economist characterizes as “problems requiring extensive remodeling.” The game has resulted in new strategies for future use. If you would like to play Foldit and possibly do valuable scientific research, the website is here.
FINDING ADDITIONAL DRUGS TO FIGHT DRUG-RESISTANT BACTERIA.
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010FINDING ADDITIONAL DRUGS TO FIGHT DRUG-RESISTANT BACTERIA. I am pleased to see intensity rising almost to violence in debates about FDA statistical methods. This article about the debates says: “At times the debate has been so heated that the acting chairman of an FDA committee opened a 2009 meeting by warning that he didn’t want to read the day next about police ‘having to arrest scientists for breaking shop windows and turning over cars.’” There should be intensity because so much is at stake—a matter of life and death (the article opens by describing the death of a toddler from a drug-resistant bacterium.) The article describes “a nearly decade-long stalemate with the Food and Drug Administration over how to bring new antibiotics to market.” Apparently the FDA is insisting on tests for approval which demonstrate that the prospective drug is better than the old one—a change from previous practice. The article says that; “For years, new antibiotics often were approved based on clinical trials that didn’t have to show the new drug was better than an old one.”
I don’t understand the FDA’s position. What is being sought is a drug to use in the case where the primary antibiotic has encountered a bacterium that is resistant to it. The new drug doesn’t have to be better in all circumstances. It has to be different. It has to work against a particular mutation. Testing to see which drug is better against non-resistant bacteria is irrelevant. And how can a control group be devised to test effectiveness against a mutation which has not yet been encountered?
“INEQUITY AVERSION”—DOES GUILT AFFECT FREE THROW SHOOTING?
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010“INEQUITY AVERSION”—DOES GUILT AFFECT FREE THROW SHOOTING? Nick sent me this link which led to this article about “inequity aversion.” The article discusses an empirical study which confirms “the hypothesis frequently put forth by Rasheed Wallace…that a player will often miss free throws after getting a foul that he does not deserve.” The empirical study showed that players made about 53% of their free throws after an obviously incorrect foul call (against average for NBA players of about 73%. The effect was stronger when the foul shooter’s team was ahead. The empirical study has support in this experiment by cognitive psychologists which measured neural responses in a simple game.
WERE THE HOMERIC GREEKS COLOR-BLIND?
Sunday, August 1st, 2010WERE THE HOMERIC GREEKS COLOR-BLIND? I posted here on the issue of whether speakers of a language with more words for a color are better at distinguishing those colors. (For example, Professor Boroditsky in her article says that Russian-speakers are better at distinguishing shades of blue because Russian has an extra distinction between light blue and dark blue.) A review by Clive Cookson of Guy Deutscher’s THROUGH THE LANGUAGE GLASS in the Financial Times a few weeks ago (June19/20) had a story about language and color that had an interesting twist. In 1858, William Gladstone, who was to have long service as British Prime Minister, advanced a theory about the Homeric Greeks. (Back then, a Prime Minister could be a classical scholar.) Gladstone published what Cookson describes as “an exhaustive study [which] showed the black-white-nature of the Homeric world; blues and greens are never mentioned, and Homer’s few colour descriptions often seem off-key.” Linguists usually frame this kind of debate in terms of the effect of language on the perception of color. Gladstone reversed the argument. He claimed that the Greeks were unable to see color the way modern people could because their eyes had not evolved to perceive color. This 1878 article from the 1878 London Times (Ah, the wonders of the internet) quotes Gladstone as arguing that …”the organ of color was but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age.” Cookson says: “In keeping with the new enthusiasm for Darwinian thinking, scientists proposed that full colour vision had evolved over the past 2,000 years or so in response to all the new colours of modern civilisation.”
DO LANGUAGES AFFECT THINKING ABOUT CAUSATION?
Saturday, July 31st, 2010DO LANGUAGES AFFECT THINKING ABOUT CAUSATION? Professor Boroditsky gives an example of a cognitive science experiment which shows how a language can shape thinking about causality. In the experiment, subjects were shown videos of people breaking eggs or spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. When the breaking or spilling was accidental, people who spoke Japanese or Spanish did not remember which of the people did it as well as English speakers remembered. Boroditsky gives the explanation that English speakers describe events in terms of agents doing things: “John broke the vase,” In Japanese or Spanish, the usual phrasing is “The vase broke itself.” Apparently people who structure their sentences in terms of agents do better at remembering who dropped an egg accidentally.
JOYCE APPLEBY’S DARWINIAN THEORY OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010JOYCE APPLEBY’S DARWINIAN THEORY OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. Niall Ferguson points out that for Appleby the changes we refer to as the Industrial Revolution were the result of an evolutionary process. Appleby’s theory stresses the trial-and-error process of innovation. He quotes Appleby: “Self-assertive individuals did the innovating in England…and they bungled as often as they hit the mark.” Thus Appleby emphasizes (as Gregory Clark does) the people who created the change (”self-assertive individuals”), but she also points out how the process worked. Ferguson quotes her: ” The phrases that we use in talking about human evolution—…’replications’, ‘random variations’, ‘waste’ and survival of the fittest’ —fit…All these came into play in the perfecting of the steam engine…..”
GREGORY CLARK’S DARWINIAN THEORY OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010GREGORY CLARK’S DARWINIAN THEORY OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. Niall Ferguson in his review of Joyce Appleby’s THE RELENTLESS REVOLUTION in the Times Literary Supplement (July 2, 2010) discusses two Darwinian theories of the Industrial Revolution that are very different. They are Darwinian in the sense that they rely on concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest. The first theory, discussed briefly, is that of Gregory Clark (I posted here on a review of Clark’s book A FAREWELL TO ALMS.) Clark’s theory operates in terms of the natural selection of the people who made the Industrial Revolution. Ferguson writes: “…Clark boldly proposed a Darwinian explanation: natural selection had caused the entrepreneurially able to outbreed the under-achievers in early modern Britain.”
